“What is love? Is it explainable even if explained?”

What you are about to read regards “love”, A correspondence between two thinkers, Jersey Flight and Damien Marie AtHope

*I, Damien offer that love is not one thing, but is definable even in romantic love.

Six Types of Love

Eros:

is romantic, passionate, love. In this type of relationship, love is life’s most important thing. A search for physical beauty or an ideal type also typifies this type of love.

Ludus:

is a game-playing or uncommitted love. Lying is part of the game. A person who pursues ludic love may have many conquests but remains uncommitted.

Storge:

is a slow developing, friendship-based loved. People with this type of relationship like to participate in activities together. Often storge results in a long-term relationship in which sex might not be very intense or passionate.

Pragma:

is a pragmatic, practical, mutually beneficial relationship. It may be somewhat unromantic. A person who leans toward this type of relationship may look for a partner at work or where the person is spending time. Sex is likely to be seen as a technical matter needed for producing children, if they are desired.

Mania:

is an obsessive or possessive love, jealous and extreme. A person in love this way is likely to do something crazy or silly, such as stalking.

Agape:

is a gentle, caring, giving type of love, brotherly love, not concerned with the self. It is relatively rare.

One study found that men were more likely to show the ludic type of love, while women were more likely to be storgic or pragmatic.

Another study conducted in two American introductory psychology classes of over 250 students each, the first five types were all familiar to over 80% of the students from their personal experience (their own relationships or people they knew). However, less than 10% of students knew somebody who expressed agape.

Studies of couples happily married for over 30 years showed that couples who rated their marriages as highly satisfactory described their relationship in terms which resembled erotic love more than the other five types. This might be surprising; in view of the earlier-mentioned finding that limerence type relationships tend to flare out quickly among college students. However, it might be the case that long-term relationships that contain both friendship and a passionate spark are more likely to endure and provide satisfaction to both parties than relationships that are low-key and pragmatic.

Love crashes like a wave,
Love subverts,
Love pursues against all reason.

It occurs to me (and god knows I am not ready to give this concession to any subject) that I think of love as something mystical as opposed to scientific. I suppose that love is the closest man can come to mysticism; the closest he can come to the divine. This is because I see love as irrational but powerful. If there is one thing we can assign the category of mysticism it must be that of love (God is not worthy). If there is one subject that defies understanding it must be that of love. I suspect that love is often without reason, which is to say, the reason for love is love itself.

———-DAMIEN ATHOPE———-

We may want love to be mysticism as we don’t want it to be understandable by science but I am here to tell you this is emotionalism as we do understand quite a lot about love but as to your point seems to say, that ability to explain the what is not the same as making the why seem any more reasoned even if the reason is identified.

According to some authors, love is defined as a desire to enter, maintain, or expand a close, connected, and ongoing relationship with another person.

Considerable evidence supports a basic distinction, first offered in 1978, between passionate love (“a state of intense longing for union with another”) and other types of romantic love, labeled companionate love (“the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined”).

The evidence for this distinction comes from a variety of research methods, including psychometric techniques (e.g., factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, and prototype analysis), examinations of the behavioral and relationship consequences of different forms of romantic love, and biological studies, which are discussed in this article.

Most work has focused on identifying and measuring passionate love and several aspects of romantic love, which include two components: intimacy and commitment. Some scholars see companionate love as a combination of intimacy and commitment whereas others see intimacy as the central component, with commitment as a peripheral factor (but important in its own right, such as for predicting relationship longevity). In some studies, trust and caring were considered highly prototypical of love, whereas uncertainty and “butterflies in the stomach” were more peripheral.

Passionate and companionate love solves different adaptational problems. Passionate love may be said to solve the attraction problem—that is, for individuals to enter into a potentially long-term mating relationship, they must first identify and select suitable candidates, attract the other’s interest, engage in relationship-building behavior, and then go about reorganizing existing activities and relationships so as to include the other. All of this is effortful, time-consuming, and disruptive. Consequently, passionate love is associated with many changes in cognition, emotion, and behavior. For the most part, these changes are consistent with the idea of disrupting existing activities, routines, and social networks to orient the individual’s attention and goal-directed behavior toward a specific new partner.

Sexual desire is often substantially linked to passionate love, although existing evidence suggests that they are empirically and functionally distinguishable. For example, romantic attraction and sexuality involve different brain systems, a contention supported de novo by recent functional magnetic resonance imaging studies.

Considerably less effort has been devoted toward understanding the evolutionary significance of the intimacy and commitment aspects of love. However, much evidence indicates that love in long-term relationships is associated with intimacy, trust, caring, and attachment, all factors that contribute to the maintenance of relationships over time.

More generally, the term companionate love may be characterized by a communal relationship: a relationship built on mutual expectations that one’s self and a partner will be responsive to each other’s needs.

It was speculated that companionate love, or at least the various processes associated with it, is responsible for the noted association between social relatedness and health and well-being. In a recent series of papers, it was claimed that marriage is linked to health benefits.

Having noted the positive functions of love, it is also important to consider the dark side. That is, problems in love and love relationships are a significant source of suicides, homicides, and both major and minor emotional disorders, such as anxiety and depression. Love matters not only because it can make our lives better, but also because it is a major source of misery and pain that can make life much worse.

One particularly timely prediction is that psychological theories of love are likely to become more biologically informed, in the sense that the psychological and behavioral phenomena associated with love will have clear, comprehensible, and distinguishable neural and hormonal substrates. This will be useful not so much for the intrinsic purpose of identifying the brain and body regions in which love occurs, but rather because the identification of neural and hormonal circuits corresponding to particular experiences and behaviors will allow researchers to sort the various phenomena associated with love into their natural categories.

For example, it will be important to further distinguish passionate love from companionate love on the one hand and from lust (i.e., sexual feelings) on the other. This distinction will be important for a key reason: although current evidence strongly suggests that these three forms of love involve different biological systems, different functions, different behaviors, and different consequences, much thinking in both popular culture and in the scientific literature conflates them. It will also be valuable to examine how neural activations of passionate and companionate love evolve in a given relationship over time, corresponding to experiential changes.

It is also believed that research will address how culture shapes the experience and expression of love. Although both passionate and companionate love appears to be universal, it is apparent that their manifestations may be moderated by culture-specific norms and rules.

Passionate and companionate love have profoundly different implications for marriage around the world, considered essential in some cultures but contra-indicated or rendered largely irrelevant in others. For example, among U.S. college students in the 1960s, only 24% of women and 65% of men considered love to be the basis of marriage, but in the 1980s this view was endorsed by more than 80% of both women and men.

Darwin actually addressed this issue. At first the charactedf ristic of altruism, the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the seeming good of one’s ethnic or kin group, seemed to him to be at odds with his theory of natural selection. He then realized that this paradox would disappear if he changed his focus from the individual with a good genetic adaptation to the group to which the individual belonged. A single individual with a genetic mutation that is highly desirable and adaptive may still die before reproducing.

If a group such as a family, a herd, or a tribe has many individuals who share the adaptation, then the propagation of that gene becomes far more likely. The survival of a genetic adaptation is dependent on the size of the number of individuals who share the genes, not just on the presence or absence of the gene in a single individual. If the individual organism’s sacrifice of itself or its offspring helps a whole group to survive, the genes that predispose it to this behavior are selected for over time. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/matter-personality/201108

———-JERSEY FLIGHT———-

There are two readers of this exchange: those in love, and those who merely stand at a distance and analyze what they think they see. I suspect the substance of love is not the analysis, but the experience of love.

Whether or not this greatest of all events; whether or not this greatest of all gifts; whether or not this most powerful of all substances can be explained biologically, makes little contact with the experience of the lover.

So far as I know there is no greater force in the universe than that of love.

Reducing love to a syllogism or empirical observation seems to miss the authentic transcendence of love.

While I do not believe in love as a supernatural thing; I do believe that love is the only thing that comes close to the supernatural, which is merely to speak of the power of love.

While your discourse focuses on the biological explanation of love, my exposition is specifically centered on the transcendence of love. And by transcendence I am not referring to metaphysics or invisible forces; I am referring to the power of love in the context of life.

Love, like hope, has the quality of transcendence. And I suppose (if we must) this can be explained by the provocation of strong feelings… however, I totally deny that these feelings are merely a figment of the imagination (for God is thus but Love is not). In this sense my dear friend… in the name of greatness, this means love is real!

respectfully yours,

Jersey Flight

———-DAMIEN ATHOPE———-

How you refer to love seems to be addressing the complex phenomenology of love. Which is still definable and to me while love is wonderful in many its attachments are natural and I reject all mystical talk as its giving that supernatural way of thinking credibility which to me it has none. To me the only transcendence is to go beyond the limitations of self and try to understand or emotionally experience through empathy the lives of others. It is easy to add all kinds of different types of emotions labeling them under love as a do everything word but is this reasoning is such thinking to make it something it may not be or do we just add that which we like or are all things justified under love? What emotions belong under the table love do we have a standard or are we doing special pleading to keep love magical seeming? If so why? If we make it just another valued emotion is it less valuable? Not to me real world experience to me has value not needing mystical anything and not loosing anything by being explainable.

What do you as the reader think?

The look of love?

What if some one asked you to think about what love looks like, what would be your answer?

If you where to think about what love looks like, wouldn’t it be a growth exercise meant to build self enlightenment and self truth?

Do you feel I or any one can define your truth about love?

If someone defined your truth about love for you, would you really own it?

Wouldn’t it make more sense instead for me to broaden your ability to see the question, “what love looks like”?

First, you would likely want to think, does a question like this of such a personal relevance have right answers?

Next, you would likely want to start thinking on what love is, would we look at are fallible behavior or some philosophical definition?

If we look at our relations with others, could we be convicted of loving?

If we wish for a philosophical definition of love, what realities does it hold in our real lives?

Is love a feeling or a behavior?

If we look at love as feeling, what emotional substance does it stem from?

If we look at love as behavior, is it fixed in the behaviors of others?